The big advantage to Bluetooth in my mind is that it is already the defacto standard and is built in all personal handheld devices. This should give consumers an easy way to control their home from their smartphones while within range.

This is just the begining of war for stake of the IoT market by different technology groups. If i'm not wrong both the groups wil be searching for any means of pushing their technologied into market for faster adoption. Some thing that needs to be closely follwed.

Fortunatelly or unfortunatelly, it the way Captalism world works. Every time when new market oppotunity shows up, various companies jump in with different and incompatible technologies, try to get lion's share and have good business from license income. Everybody wants to be like Apple.

Of course their mastermind plan do not always works. In fact there are much more failures than very few sucess. Sometimes the "new market oppotunity" do not happen after all. That was what happend to UWB (Ultra Wide Band) fiesta about 10 years ago.

Is IOT/IOE real or marketing bluff? I don't know. Only time will tell. Who will be the winner of IOT? I could be millionere if I know :-) Perhaps different standard will be used in fragmented market segments - for example 802.15.4g + SEP2.0 for smart grid, Bluetooth LE for mobile application, some IP-based WiFi IOT for home appliance. There might not be single, universal, can-do-everything "holy grail" IOT standard protocol. Maybe.

Representatives from a lot of these IOT manufacturers, including Zigbee, zWave, and Bluetooth Smart are furious to hear about yet-another-IOT standard--Thread.

I could just imagine how the Bluetooth group feels--talk about stealing their thunder. They had just made an announcement with CSR (Cambridge Silicon Radio) for using Bluetooth in a mesh for home control, then Thread gets announced, by Google and Samsung no less.

As a consumer I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it seems that with so many standards, there will never be any compatibility among the many devices out there. Will the Philips Hue light bulbs work with Bluetooth Mesh or Thread? Nope.

On the other hand, the one thing common among the standards out there now, is the high cost. I assume that there are high licensing costs involved. And I assume that will also be true with Bluetooth mesh.

Two things Google has managed with Android is to have a big ecosystem with lots of software, and bringing costs down. If they can do this with Thread too, then consumers win. Even if Thread doesn't end up being the winner (in truth, Bluetooth Mesh sounds promising), if it forces the others to raise their standards of security and useabliltiy while bringing costs down, then we all win.

Yes, it can. As long as IP packet get through. However Bluetooth have long history that it do not work very well with IP. Original LAN Profile was instant failure. PAN profile (sometimes called BNEP, Bluetooth Network Encupsulation Protocol) was not great success neither.

Even though Bluetooth SIG announced that "BT4.1 CAN support IPv6" but I believe no implementation still exists today. As long as I know there is no description how to implement IP over BT in BT4.1 core spec. IP neighbor discovery is heavily relys on multicast, but Blutooth do not handle multicast very well. Fragmentation is another issue they must solve. BTLE frame size is 39byte maximum, much shorter than notorious 802.15.4 (127byte max). Do they apply 6LowPAN? I don't know.

They say IPv6 over BT is "work in progress". Until we see actual implementation, we don't know how practical IP over BT4.1 really is.

This is a battle on two fronts - the radio layer and the protocol layer. BT smart would seem to be an established technology when it comes to the radio layer, but at the protocol layer, there are many groups trying to create IoT protocols that bridge devices to the general internet.

Those protocols are invariably IP based, so the radio layer is going to have to meet them with an IP API. 6LoWPAN does that, but IP over BT Smart has only just started to be discussed:

From http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320284

"We created the railroad track and still need to engineer the train on how it's going to carry the traffic," he said. "We know people are interested in using Bluetooth to carry IP traffic natively. It's not necessarily a limitation today...but we want to provide another option for the next generation of technology."

In conjunction with unveiling of EE Times’ Silicon 60 list, journalist & Silicon 60 researcher Peter Clarke hosts a conversation on startups in the electronics industry. One of Silicon Valley's great contributions to the world has been the demonstration of how the application of entrepreneurship and venture capital to electronics and semiconductor hardware can create wealth with developments in semiconductors, displays, design automation, MEMS and across the breadth of hardware developments. But in recent years concerns have been raised that traditional venture capital has turned its back on hardware-related startups in favor of software and Internet applications and services. Panelists from incubators join Peter Clarke in debate.